Writing His Own Ticket : Michael Sargent, 21, is author-director of ‘I Hate!’ and hailed as a new force in theater

On the outside, at least, Michael Sargent appeared to be happy. He greeted his guest at the door with a genuinely broad smile, a quiet voice and a boyish manner--he’s 21--and he was still coming down from the opening night of his new play. All seemed to be well with the world.

The previous morning, though, hours before Sargent’s “I Hate!” was to open at the Cast Theatre--where it continues through March 9--the world was upside down. The show wasn’t just the fruition of a year’s work; it was Sargent’s first time directing in a professional theater.

“I literally woke up crying,” he said. “I was a wreck. The technical aspects of the sound (designed by Don Preston, former member of the Mothers of Invention) hadn’t been completed at all. Everyone was waiting to see if it was all going to come together. It was the opening night tension, of course, but it quickly became a good tension, the kind of tension I haven’t had for a couple of years.”

Since the summer of 1988, to be exact, when a pair of Sargent one-acts, “And a Honky Tonk Girl Says She Will” and “Big Boy,” opened the first season of the Heliogabalus company, founded by playwright John Steppling and director/actor Bob Glaudini. Barely out of UCLA and its theater arts department, Sargent had much the same effect on critics that he had had on other members of Steppling’s play writing workshop at 17.

Admitting to feeling fairly self-conscious as the youngest in a room of veteran theater people (“most of them had written produced plays”), he nevertheless bowled people over with his work. Steppling: “Here was this quiet kid, not saying much for a few classes, and then it was his turn to present something and out came this very original, weird black comedy. Everyone in the class knew he had something special.”

Steppling’s one constant piece of advice, according to Sargent, was to get the writing up on its feet, to stage it. So when Steppling saw a UCLA workshop production of “Honky Tonk Girl,” much despised by the faculty, “he liked it so much,” Sargent said, “that he said, ‘This is it. I want this for our season at the Cast.’ ”

The critics thought it was a good move. Richard Stayton, in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, marveled at Sargent’s “shocking maturity of craftsmanship and vision. Play writing this seasoned, sardonic and erotic usually emerges only after a career of hard knocks and betrayals.” T. H. McCulloh described Sargent in Drama-Logue as “a firecracker waiting to go off, the fuse lit by the style but filled with the gunpowder of his own literary identity and a freewheeling sense of humor that sets him apart.”

That’s a lot at 20, and there’s more: at 19, he won the American College Theatre Festival national award for his play, “When Esther Saw the Light,” which saw the light at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

If it all sounds too good to be true, it is, in a sense. The Washington critics, Sargent said, lambasted “Esther” (about a woman who kills her child), the audiences rarely applauded it at curtain and the cast had a miserable time. He read the “Big Boy” raves while sitting in his car, about to find any kind of job at all since he was out of money.

Even the Heliogabalus invitation came at a difficult time. “The day that John called me with the good news,” Sargent said, “was the same day my mom called from Northern California for help. She was having a hard time right then.”

Just as his characters often experience rather drastic shifts of fortune--usually for the worse--Sargent has experienced the sensation of life’s rug getting pulled from under him. “My family came out from Ohio when I was a kid. My father was a film and TV actor, then got into some investments. He was an alcoholic, went bankrupt, then, recently, my parents split up. He’s back in Ohio, and she’s in Petaluma.

“The thing was that while I was at UCLA, I didn’t know about everything happening back home. I had my own apartment and a BMW. My parents supported me as long as they could, and then the money was gone. Suddenly, I was sleeping on floors in friend’s places. I was unhappy and sick with an asthma condition.”

The asthma, he reported, is fading away, and he credits this to his new-found passions for meditation, yoga and spiritual readings. “It’s replacing the materialism I was raised with, though it hasn’t changed my sarcastic, black view of the world, or my main themes: self-worth and disappointment.”

He calculates that, with “I Hate!,” he’s written 20 plays, with two full-length plays in the works--”My Crime,” loosely based on Errol Flynn’s scandalous twilight years, and “Tarantula,” about, as Sargent puts it, “a Barbara Hutton-type heiress.”

An avowed old-movie buff, Sargent describes “I Hate!” as “my take on film noir , especially on James M. Cain, my favorite novelist. The plot is based on a l’amour fou kind of relationship” involving a retired, decaying silent movie star (played by Lee Kissman), a boarder (Jason Reed) and an outsider (Shawna Casey).

“Audiences will be laughing their heads off while watching my plays,” he said, “but if you ask them afterward to describe what was so funny, they’ll make it sound pretty grim. That’s because, in my study of comedy techniques, I will apply them to material that isn’t funny. That creates a tension, which has a dislocating effect on the audience.”

This is the quality that stands out in Sargent’s writing, even more than the dramatis personae of lowlifes or the short scene structure that echo much of the work of the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop/Festival, from which Heliogabalus is an off-shoot. (Besides, Sargent added, “I was already writing in short scenes by the time I visited Padua in ‘85, so it was reassuring to see others doing it.”)

It was at Padua that Sargent met Kissman, who has been either encouraging him, directing his plays or collaborating with him since. “Lee took me very seriously from the start. Writing plays made me less aware of my own voice than the fiction I wrote, but Lee’s direction took me to another level of my own awareness. I had an idea of how ‘Big Boy’ would be staged, for example, but Lee brought in a naturalistic tone that I didn’t expect but which really improved it.”

Now the tables are somewhat turned, and Sargent is directing Kissman in “I Hate!” Sargent: “I’ve borrowed from Lee’s directing style, which emphasizes the actors’ emotions first and then the physical work. I’m finding it useful to work that way.”

Though his family’s bad fortunes prevented him from finishing his UCLA studies--”the theater people were very conservative there anyway: they didn’t care much for my doing an AIDS play with nudity and graphic sex”--he is still studying, only now on the job. “He really listens and processes what people suggest to him,” said Steppling, “and that is actually a rare quality.

“Michael’s enormously gifted and, even more important, he appreciates his gift,” Steppling said. “He understands that at his age he’s not going to do great work. He’ll make mistakes. But he’s aware when he does. I suspect that he’s working out a theatrical strategy, a style for the stage, to match his voice. I have no doubt that he’s going to write some extraordinary things.”

“I Hate!” plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays through March 9 at the Cast Theatre, 800 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood. Tickets are $5. For information, call (213) 462-0265.